Curiosity (37 page)

They disembark in Cockmoile Square. While Mr. Aveline and Henry’s mother hurry to the entrance, Letitia lingers before the dark windows on Bridge Street. Henry tries to steer her across the square and she leans against him and turns her face up to his, crying gaily, “Pray tell me, what is the impression in Lyme Regis society of Henry’s fiancée?”

“No impression at all,” he says. “Inasmuch as there is no society in Lyme.”

She gives a little slap to his gloved hand. “You’ve never spoken of me to your friends?”

“Of course, your name is known. But I prefer to leave the pleasure of discovery to others. What does a bachelor have, but his air of mystery?” There is the sea in front of them, night birds hanging motionless over the persistent waves. She says something else, but the moving darkness takes it away, and he pulls at her arm and then they’re at the narrow rectangle of light in the stone portico and through it. Looming just inside the door, waiting to greet them, is the Squire and, hidden behind him, his earnest little wife.

In the custom of country dances, they’re served hot beef broth in a cup. The fiddles start up and they part and face each other in the wavering lines of dancers. Letitia sinks to honour her partner. When her glowing head comes up, she’s applied a mask of gaiety, which stays on through the dance. But the minute the music lapses, she lifts her skirt with a brave little pout to show him her ankle. She’s been wounded – why do the cavalry officers insist on wearing spurs? Miraculously, her stocking’s not torn, although a mark can be seen darkly through it. There is blood on her gown, though, three red drops like blighted cherries just above the glossy embroidered fruit – his blood, he suddenly realizes: somehow he’s scratched the fleshy base of his thumb. They find a spot on the side and he picks up her wrist, feeling along the woven gold of her bracelet until he locates a sharp wire sticking out of it. While he’s bending the wire back with his fingernail, the second dance begins.

She holds her skirt out of the way of tramping feet. She looks up at him with an expression of appeal – she wants to say something and the violins are very loud. He bends over. “It was by royal edict?” she says into his ear. So. This will be her method of intimacy: the startling, whispered non sequitur.

They inch further back against the wall. “The king was the sponsor of Great Marlow,” he says. “Everything was by royal edict, every trifle. The hay for the stables was ordered by royal edict.”

“Will it prevent our being presented at court?”

“Yes,” he says. “Yes, I believe it will.” Laughter begins to shake his diaphragm.

“Why did you never tell me?”

He watches the swirl of colour on the dance floor and does not reply.

“What was it the edict said, as to cause?”

“It said
insubordination
,” he says. “Only that. And I did tell you. Five minutes after we’d met, I’d pressed a kiss upon you. How did you understand that?” He’s had nothing to drink, only the broth. Possibly it was spiked with negus.

A solicitor sets out his papers in piles on the dining room table. A sober conversation, long overdue. The house in Bristol has been sold to pay loans drawn against Uncle Alger’s estate: nothing there. Numerous reports from the attorney regarding Halse Hall: three hundred and fifty of Jamaica’s sugar plantations now closed, over half. How is it that the French colonies can produce sugar at so little cost? A short discussion follows on this subject. It’s clear that there will be no income at all without Letitia’s. This is understood by everyone at the table, and there is no need for his mother to spell it out. He looks at her with deep resentment.
Madame Trois-Mari
, they call her in town. This is all her fault, he thinks, unreasonably. And yet, what else is to be done? And Letitia (who is not at the table) may be a more suitable wife than most. She’s shown remarkable independence, remarkable tolerance of his inattention to her. She is, after all, the stepdaughter of an innkeeper, although this is never mentioned. To demonstrate his good intentions on all fronts, professional and personal, Henry settles two hundred pounds on her for her private use, in addition to a dress allowance. His mother offers up Daisy, salary paid for the year, and tractable enough to serve as both lady’s maid and housemaid.

While the documents are being completed, Letitia’s gown arrives from London. His mother contrives to have a jacket with square tails made for him, swallowtails having fallen out of favour for weddings. He writes letters postponing the summer’s fieldwork indefinitely. He and Letitia will go away immediately after the wedding: society will soon exhaust the topic of the
bride’s irregular behaviour. They’ll tour the Continent while Henry can still raise money against the plantation. He rides to Axminster alone on a drizzly afternoon. The agent can offer nothing for three months, such is the pent-up demand for Paris since the war ended. Finally, he books passage on the
Lady Jane James
packet for July.

“We will have a bit of time to catch our breath before the wedding,” he says to his mother at breakfast the next morning.

“No,” she says. All the disgust she feels at his lacklustre self is in the
No
. “You will marry now and stay here until your passage. Or you can tour Sussex and Kent on your way to Dover.” She has settled on a Thursday morning two weeks away, and he goes to the magistrate and arranges a special licence.

He collects Letitia from Morley Cottage in mid-morning and she spends the days at Aveline House. She’s attentive to his mother and kind to the servants, determined to be charmed by the simplicity of everything, eager to take the cure in a bathing machine. She shows an interest in Mr. Aveline’s ailments and pursuits, watching entranced when he winds up his model of the heavens and its planets turn sedately around the sun. Colonel Birch comes to call and she listens to his entire life story, taking care to keep the drawing room door propped open throughout his visit; it is her settled impression that military men cannot tolerate enclosed spaces.

He has the sense of a compelling conversation interrupted. No time for fossiling, no chance even for a private word with his mother: she’s given herself over to the cultivation of her new daughter-in-law. Whatever do they talk about? he wonders, intruding on a poignant tête-à-tête in the drawing room, the tracks of unwiped tears on Letitia’s cheeks. His mother makes a gift to Letitia of her own beloved copy of
Persuasion
. Letitia reads it in two days, and then she must be taken down to the
Cobb to see where the fictional Louisa fell on the steps. The tide is fully out; the fishing boats stranded inside the Cobb sink into the mud. Henry and Letitia walk out on the tilting dark stones and the wind buffets them. He’s pleased by how game Letitia is, laughing and turning her face to the wind, her pretty form in a rose-coloured coat a picturesque anomaly against the threatening sky. As she comes down the steps and tumbles into his arms, he presses her against the wall, nuzzling his face in her cheek and slipping a hand into the opening of her coat. But she pushes him away. “You’ll spoil your appetite with sweets before supper,” she says, and he follows her up to Marine Parade, vexed, not at being thwarted, but at the primness and worldly knowing so casually intermingled in her expression.

In the afternoon, she sits by the window, informing her friends of the impending nuptials and grand tour. She writes on fine, lavender-tinted paper. She never blots her letters for fear of smudges, but looks them over fondly as she waits for the ink to dry.
France!
she reads out to Henry.
How the senses crave what the heart fears! Will there truly be houses and chimneys and sheep in the fields? Are the stones of Rue de Rivoli stained yet with blood or have they been washed clean?
He listens perplexed. How ironic, how perverse, that she puts on this persona for his benefit. Possibly, in a moment of rare authenticity, she frightened herself. Like the subject of a portrait stepping out of its ornate frame, standing disoriented on the hall tiles. He looks at her with a new sympathy. He’s changed as well (he sees, to his surprise and satisfaction): forebearance has grown within him without his notice. Marriage will require it, and in the season of all things, it has appeared.

But then she announces her desire to live in Bristol, and an unbearable clamour of distress starts up in him. “It’s out of the question!” he shouts. Tears, never far from the surface, rise in
her eyes. He turns furiously away from them. Why has he been sitting around in the stuffy drawing room all day? It’s essential that he maintain his routine of solitude and work. He slams out into the hall, filled with resolve to allow no small change that will open the door to larger ones. Buckland is back from Europe, but not in town. Very well, he will invite Mary Anning to the shore.

He snatches up his satchel of tools and starts down Broad Street. Mary’s mother is sweeping in the square and he hurries towards her, but she opens the door of the house as he approaches, and as she steps inside, she turns her face towards him, her cheeks hollow where teeth have been lost, her eyes exhausted. A face that brings up the regrettable image of a Middle Ages
sage femme
. She has virtually closed the door in his face; he can’t bring himself to knock. He walks by and turns up Church Street. But as he descends the path from the cemetery, there is Mary herself on the eastern shore below, walking quickly with her basket over her arm. He calls out to her, but the wind is high and carries his voice out to sea. By the time he’s down on the shore, she is nowhere to be found. He can see a mile in either direction. He can’t imagine where she could have gone, unless she climbed back up the cliffs by one of the paths that only she seems to know.

No matter, he’ll work by himself. He’ll make Mary the chart she asked for, one that shows the vertical elevation of the cliffs. The view of a mole, she said. She can have it to work with while he is gone, to chart her finds on it. The territory of her explorations is three miles, from Pinhay Bay in the west to Charmouth in the east. He’ll start close to town to develop his method and work outwards from there. He’ll use his plumb line to measure along the lip of the cliff where they walked the last time they were out together, when the sun shone so that the shore seemed all to be blue from the tidal pools reflecting back the sky. When
she was tipsy. On a single glass of sherry. Perhaps she’d never had liquor before – was it possible?

And he’ll colour it. He’ll choose pigments for each layer that match the colours in the cliffs: blue for the carboniferous limestone, vermilion for the sandstone, and so on.

Back in the drawing room after an afternoon lying on his belly and watching his plumb line snag itself on the cliff face, he crosses to warm his hands at the fire and a dark, overdressed woman sits up on the settee. His new mother-in-law, who apparently outpaced the letter announcing her arrival. “Penrose,” she cries, putting out a row of knuckles to be kissed.

Henry’s mother and Letitia hurry in. “Mamma! That’s not Penrose,” Letitia says. “You were dreaming. You remember Henry.” He bends over Mrs. Auriol’s hand. And Uncle Clement, whittled down to the fundamentals of sinew and skin, is there too, so there will be gaiety and an extra course at supper.

After he’s bathed, they sit down to a game of whist in the drawing room. Letitia has apparently recovered from her distress about Bristol. She’s struck up a gleeful camaraderie with Clement, who undertakes to teach her to shuffle and deal in the Continental style. It has always been a question of some import in Henry’s mind, how Letitia endured his long absences, how she employed her talent for flirtation. He questioned her the other night about various gentlemen they knew in common. Henry Wyndham was a lieutenant colonel with the Coldstream Guards and was terribly wounded at Waterloo, she told him. Phillip Marchand, who so distinguished himself at faro the weekend near Evershot, has fallen out with his family and gone to America. She was entirely composed in the telling, seemingly uninterested. But now she’s set out to charm Clement because she so easily can, or because her mother, posing and purring in purple velvet, has the same purpose.
Lucky Uncle Clement, the thin, nervous rake – the object of attention of two such energetic women!

Letitia watches Clement’s demonstration with her chin cupped in her hand. With idle fingers, she pulls at the sausage curls bunched at each cheek, admiring their spring. Perhaps it’s this gesture that prompts Clement to a story about a lady of his acquaintance who sadly endured the ending of a love affair not long ago. “She wrote to the gentleman in question,” says Clement, organizing the cards in his hand with a flourish, “demanding the return of the lock of hair she had given him as a token. Shortly after, the gentleman’s servant appeared at her door with an enamel casket. The lady opened it eagerly, only to find within a tangled mass of hair, locks of blond, raven, and auburn, each tied with its own ribbon.
My lord requests that you kindly retrieve your property
, the servant said.”

Letitia’s laugh is a tinkle, her mother’s a bleat. Outside the triangle of their mutual charm, the smell of the shore clings to Henry.

Letitia recounts to Clement how, when they were scarcely out of childhood, Henry lured her into the woods to see a dunning on its nest.

“
Dunnock
,” Henry says.

“In any case, Mr. Mollot, there was none,” Letitia says, dropping a trump on Henry’s knave.

TWENTY-FOUR